


The Burning Girl

by Trixen



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-18 04:37:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4692341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixen/pseuds/Trixen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I've got you belly-deep in me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Burning Girl

She cuts her hair again the day after the prom. She is not eating waffles with heavy globs of cherry ice cream. She is not listening to ‘I’ve Had the Time of My Life’, which embarrassingly, she did repeatedly after Sadie Hawkins, the headphones sweaty with a shameful fantasy, in which he took her up against a bitingly cool locker door and whispered words of love and redemption. A flair for the dramatic, has Logan, and she was craving that weight of feeling. Seems silly now.  
  
She is slouched on the floor of her bedroom, looking up at her mirror. The slip of paper with its fortune is about to fall from its perch. Her hair is in her eyes and it is pissing her off in a major way that is perhaps a little out of proportion but somehow, proportion seems off anyway.   
  
She decides to cut her hair and so she does. That’s her MO, after all. Action. Do, not say. Her mouth tastes of sickness and the scissors gleam wetly and her hair falls in huge chunks across the sink. With each _swish swish_ of metal, she cries, and her tears feel hot and vast. She cries a little at her own melodrama as well.   
  
Veronica just _hates_ being a cliché.  
  
+  
  
There is a brief glow after Aaron dies. It is a bubble, a lapse in ordinary time. Just a momentary thing, but still, it feels effortless, and she blows a kiss to Duncan, and while she does not take the fortune from her mirror, it has ceased meaning what it once meant. She gets over herself a bit because Cassidy is splattered over a Mercedes SUV and Aaron is splattered on a TV screen and life is catching up with her.   
  
Drunken one-night-stands seem unimportant and forgiveness seems the least she can give, especially after she remembers Logan holding her hair back from her face as she gagged and sobbed and vomited on the kitchen floor. After she remembers that she screamed _Daddy Daddy Daddy_ until her voice split and she tasted blood in her mouth. He cleaned her up and let her crawl into Keith’s room (she was searching for his pajamas, wanting to crawl outside of her _self_ ) and listened to her gibberish. She remembers that he did not say a single word, so difficult for Logan – who wishes to fill silences to make them less meaningful – and cradled her on his lap, ignoring the way she smelled, the stink of grief, and _held_ her into exhausted dreams.   
  
But then New York falls through and Logan leaves messages on her machine in numerous voices, which all reek of alcohol. In between humming ‘It’s a Hard Knock Life’ and whispering what a ratassbastard his father was, he tells her what he would like to do to her. Amidst the ugliness, there are threads of burning and she plays the messages over and over while she is beneath sheets in darkness, listening to the rise and fall of his voice, guttural with longing.  
  
It makes her skin feel tight. She remembers Lilly gesturing to the bulge in Logan’s jeans, raising her eyebrows – how that made her feel hot and strange – the _wrongness_ and maleness of it. She remembers the one time in the poolhouse, a different pair of jeans pulled down around his knees, her hands holding his thighs apart, his penis shiny from her mouth and the moans dragged deep from his throat.   
  
“Veronica,” he whispers on her machine, and it so hot in her room, why is it so hot? “Veronica, d’you know what my Dad always said to me? Just as he was closing the door, belt in hand, he’d say I was gonna be just like him. What would that make me? Tortured and murderous or just a fucking bad actor?”  
  
She laughs, the machine whirring against her cheek, and the tears in the back of her throat sting. She cleaned her hair from the sink, but she can still see it glowing in the wastebasket.   
  
“Whatever,” Logan mumbles, and it sounds as if he is taking a drink. “Maybe that’s why he hated me so much, you know. Cause it was like lookin’ in a mirror. But explain _that_ shit to my back.” He pauses. “Call me and tell me what you’re wearing. Use colorful adjectives.”  
  
+  
  
It is late June when she takes a walk on the beach and he is standing there, smelling of rapeseed and promises – broken – and she wants to look at him and so she does. His hair is falling over his forehead and she thinks that he should not devastate her so much, but now they both know how much and somehow, that makes it worse. Before, it was simply her secret. And it was not the request for Summer Lovin’ that would have clued him in, it was her repetition of his forgotten words. Epic. Because he knows that she hates cliché, and if she believed _that_ , she must be in deep.   
  
She turns to go.  
  
“You’re walking away,” he observes mildly.  
  
“Your powers of observation haven’t dulled.”  
  
Logan’s hand slides over her shoulder and she shudders, full-body. “Yours, on the other hand, could use some work.”  
  
“Why is that?” she breathes.  
  
His palm covers her belly. “You don’t see me.”  
  
“I see you.”  
  
“Nope, Veronica, you don’t. If you did, you might pick up your phone once in a while and indulge the orphan in his rantings.”  
  
She flinches. “Logan—“  
  
He pulls her back against him. “Too much for you to handle? You know, this feels oddly reminiscent of last summer. It’s like home.”  
  
“I’m sorry. I have to—“  
  
“Go? The familiar keeps on coming.”  
  
She turns a little and finally looks up, into his eyes. “You can’t – want me. You know what he did.”  
  
He touches her face. “This doesn’t sound like you.”  
  
“It’s the new me,” she says bitterly.   
  
“I like your hair.”  
  
“Logan—“  
  
“Don’t leave me again,” he says simply, but his eyes burn.   
  
She kisses him. There just isn’t, in the end, any other livable choice.  
  
+  
  
Dick throws parties every night, in his big, big house. Endless summer ragers, with kegs and foamy beer spilt on the lawn. Sometimes she goes, just because, and she drinks, just because, and Dick admires her short hair, his hand mussing the layered ends that skim her shoulders.   
  
“Dude, you’re all butch.” His eyebrows wiggle. “Are you like, gonna join ‘The L Word’ now?”   
  
He does not seem to hold it against her that she was there when his baby brother stepped off the roof and out of his life.   
  
But she thinks that he probably hates her. She sees it in the blankness of his eyes and the way he does not smell of surf and sand, but rather of shut-in rooms and bile. And really, well, why wouldn’t he hate her? After all, Cassidy is still dead and Dick’s name is somehow less funny now, isn’t it? Dick and Beaver _together_ was the joke. There just isn’t anything to laugh about anymore. When Sean tries to call him ‘Richard’, Dick shoves him through a patio door and the glass is beautiful when it breaks against the night.   
  
Usually after the parties, she goes to Mac’s. They sit on the swings behind her house, holding hands. Veronica feels uneasy with it – the touching – but she will offer anything she can.  
  
Mac sometimes speaks. “Do you think we made him up?”  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Because I was thinking about how you said he-- said his name was Cassidy and—“ Mac takes a breath and her tears smell of vinegar. “And—maybe all this time we made him up—maybe Beaver was who we wanted him to be but it was Cassidy who was trying to—“  
  
“Get his psycho on?” Veronica supplies softly.  
  
“Yeah.” Mac swings a little. “Or to be heard?”  
  
“I prefer two paper cups and a string, but that’s just me.”  
  
+  
  
Logan has a temper, and if he fucks her in the thick of it, she will have ten bruises on her arms the next morning. Sometimes she is on top, and she controls him by holding his hands above his head, feeling her nipples rasp against his chest. But he always, _always_ flips her onto her back, driving into her until all she can do is gasp painful gorgeous breaths.   
  
“I fucking love you,” he says into her ear, hot and wet, and she tastes ashes on her lips.   
  
**Finis**


End file.
